Would they have done it anyway?
You're boarding your flight for your vacation to Málaga. The airline employee scans your ticket and hands you a brochure.
You put the brochure in your pocket and take it out once you’re settled in your seat. Several people around you are looking at the same brochure. It promotes the airline’s flights to Málaga.
It’s well written and well designed. It portrays Málaga as an ideal vacation destination, and based on the price chart, this airline unquestionably offers the best fares. You ask a flight attendant if they have brochures for any other destinations. She tells you that passengers only receive the brochure for the destination of their flight.
Meanwhile, the marketing team back at the airline's corporate headquarters is celebrating their campaign's 100 percent conversion rate. Everyone who receives a Málaga brochure travels to Málaga. But has the campaign actually changed anyone’s behavior?
If you stand by a cash register and hand a postcard promoting your store to everyone who makes a purchase, you can say that everyone who received the postcard visited your store. A speaker can give a flyer to guests entering an auditorium and claim that 100 percent of the people who received it attended the presentation. The statements are accurate, but they don’t tell us whether the marketing changed anything.
Good marketing changes decisions
Many marketing reports stop at questions such as: How many leads did we get? How many people converted? How many people attended the event or purchased the product? Those are all valuable questions. But they answer only one side of the equation.
In the airline example, a 100 percent conversion rate among people who were going to take the flight anyway is less valuable than a 10 percent conversion rate among people who otherwise would not have taken the trip.
The airline could invest the same amount of money, time and effort into promoting a different destination to those passengers. The data may not have looked as impressive, but it likely would have been more meaningful.
Of course real campaigns are rarely as obvious as handing someone a brochure after they have booked and boarded a flight. Most of the time, organizations cannot know who would have acted anyway. That’s why marketing should be viewed through both short-term and long-term lenses.
Behavior-changing marketing strategies do not always produce an immediate response. Someone may encounter an organization repeatedly for years without doing anything. Then a need arises, and that organization is one of the first they consider. They may not consciously know why the name feels familiar, and the organization will never be able to trace the decision back to one advertisement, article or sponsorship.
That uncertainty makes awareness campaigns easy to dismiss. They often cost more, convert fewer people and take longer to show results. But without them, organizations risk turning marketing into a series of one-off campaigns that fail to build on each other and mostly reach people who already know the brand.
The solution is to measure different campaigns based on what they need to accomplish. A campaign intended to generate registrations should be evaluated primarily by its ability to produce registrations. A campaign intended to build awareness requires different measures.
Start by defining who the intended audience is. Are you trying to reach a different age group, a new geographic area or people who are unfamiliar with a particular product or service? Then look for signs that familiarity is growing. Are more people recognizing the organization in surveys? Have searches and website visits increased? Are more customers coming from the audience you intended to reach?
The campaign results also need context. If awareness remains low, the campaign may simply not be effective. If the numbers rise quickly and then level off, the campaign may be recycling the same audience and adjustments might be needed.
None of these measures will prove that a particular campaign caused a purchase two years later. That may never be possible. Real customer journeys are rarely linear. They can unfold over an extended period, with multiple interactions before someone finally takes action.
Mixing Long-term and short-term campaigns
Research consistently supports balancing immediate-response marketing with longer-term brand building. As a practical starting point, organizations should consider dedicating around 30-40 percent of their advertising budget to building awareness, familiarity, and future demand, then adjust that balance based on their audience, goals, and existing level of recognition.
That balance does not need to exist within every individual channel. Some platforms may be used primarily for immediate conversion, while others may play a larger role in building awareness. What matters is that the overall strategy supports both short-term results and longer-term growth.
Long-term campaigns will not always produce a clear or immediate return. That does not mean spending without purpose. It means defining the audience, deciding what progress should look like, and giving the work enough time to have an effect.
Not every campaign is meant to create a quick spike. Some are meant to make sure the organization comes to mind when a need eventually arises. So the next time a marketing team discusses a campaign with a 25 percent conversion rate, it’s important to ask: would they have done it anyway?